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I am a Ph.D. student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. I study the History of Biblical Interpretation, which includes Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. My interests are religion, politics, TV, movies, and reading.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Book Write-Up: Dinosaurs, by Dr. Tim Clarey

Tim Clarey is a young earth creationist, who serves at the Institute
for Creation Research. According to his profile at the ICR’s web site,
he has a Ph.D. in Geology from Western Michigan University. He was also
an exploration geologist for Chevron, and he taught geo-science at
Delta College in Michigan.

Clarey presents a young earth creationist perspective on dinosaurs.
This perspective is that God created the dinosaurs on Day 6 of creation,
when God created the other land animals (Genesis 1). According to
Clarey, this means that the dinosaurs were on earth thousands of years
ago, not millions, and Clarey challenges the reliability of scientific
dating methods that point to an older age for the dinosaurs. Clarey
believes that all of the dinosaurs were originally vegetarian, and that
the carnivorous ones became carnivorous only after the Fall of Adam and
Eve; these dinosaurs had a vegetarian diet on Noah’s Ark, however. For
Clarey, the dinosaur fossils were the result of the catastrophic Flood
in the time of Noah, and this accounts for phenomena better than
uniformitarian and evolutionary explanations. According to Clarey, Noah
took some dinosaurs onto the Ark, and Noah was able to fit them on the
Ark because the average size of dinosaurs was about the size of a bison,
and Noah took the bigger ones onto the Ark before they hit their growth
spurt; the dinosaurs on the Ark, in short, were not huge, so they could
fit. For Clarey, humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth at the same
time, and this is evidenced by stories about dragons and representations
of creatures that look like dinosaurs. Clarey believes that dinosaurs
became extinct after the Flood: before the Flood, Clarey argues, there
was a higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and that suited the
cold-blooded dinosaurs, but the environment was not as warm after the
Flood. Clarey also criticizes evolution in the book: he states that
there is no evidence of transitional fossils when it comes to dinosaurs,
and he disputes the idea that dinosaurs evolved into birds.

That is Clarey’s perspective. Does he try to support it? He does.
He argues that organic material found in dinosaur bones, and carbon-14
dating, indicates that the dinosaurs are thousands, not millions, of
years old, since organic material would not last for millions of years.
He believes that phenomena demonstrated in the fossil record—-animals
dying suddenly (and at various stages of life), dinosaurs being mixed
with marine creatures, footprints indicating that dinosaurs were fleeing
from something, and fossils of herds found together, etc.—-are
consistent with a catastrophic Flood. In arguing against the idea that
birds evolved from dinosaurs, Clarey notes differences in the breathing
apparatus between birds and dinosaurs, and Clarey also states that
“Birds with real feathers are found in rocks much deeper and buried
before the most birdlike dinosaurs” (page 125). In conventional
science, deeper in usually earlier, so, for Clarey, the idea that birds
evolved from dinosaurs fails even on conventional scientific grounds.

Did Clarey interact with other points-of-view, or alternative
explanations? He did refer to alternative explanations. He mentioned
the view that the carbon-14 dating of material in dinosaur bones may be
due to corruption of the sample. He said that scientists have proposed
ways that organic material could have been preserved in dinosaur bones
for millions of years. He referred to the view that ancient people may
have developed their ideas of mythological creatures after finding
dinosaur fossils. He also said that scientists have attributed certain
examples of fossilization to local catastrophes (i.e., floods) rather
than a single global Flood in the time of Noah. Did Clarey go into a
lot of depth in refuting these ideas, or answer many of the objections
to Flood geology that scientists have made? Overall, he did not, but
some of his discussions were more in depth than others.

Did Clarey attempt to provide a young-earth creationist
interpretation, or way to account for, the evidence often cited in favor
of uniformitarian, evolutionist explanations? He did, at times. One
argument against humans and dinosaurs co-existing is that human fossils
have not been found with dinosaur fossils. Clarey tried to account for
this by saying that humans and dinosaurs lived in separate places:
dinosaurs were on the low ground, whereas humans and various other
mammals were on the high ground. Clarey also tried to account for
fossil layers, which mainstream science says demonstrate chronological
successions of life and evolution over millions of years. Clarey, as a
young-earth creationist, does not think that one fossil layer on top of
the other means chronological succession, for he believes that the
animals in all of these layers existed at the same time and were
destroyed by the Flood. Clarey sought to explain the fossil layers by
saying that the Flood could have buried one ecosystem on top of the
other, and that marine creatures would logically be deeper in the ground
than creatures that were able to find higher ground in the time of the
Flood. For Clarey, that explains why fossils of marine creatures are
deeper in the ground than dinosaurs and mammals.

Some of Clarey’s proposals may be original to himself; many things
that he says have been said by young-earth creationists before.
Young-earth creationism is rejected by most scientists, and there are
many web sites out there that respond to young-earth creationist
arguments from an evolutionist or uniformitarian perspective, and that
highlight problems in Flood geology: www.talkorigins.org, www.thenaturalhistorian.com, www.ncse.com, and www.edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com
are sites that come to mind. These sites, and others, provide a lot of
arguments and rebuttals, and I will not rehearse all of them here.
Many of them demonstrate that there is more to the story, or more
nuance, than what young earth creationists present. I would like to
highlight some anti-young earth creationist arguments that I found
particularly compelling. One argument asks why, if dinosaurs are young
rather than old, it is such a rarity that we find organic material
inside dinosaur bones? Another argument maintains that the young-earth
creationist view that more developed animals could run to higher ground
in trying to escape the Flood does not work, for there are fossils of
developed animals that are rather deep in the ground, and fossils of
marine animals that are higher up. Plus, one can observe development in
marine animals from one strata to another.

I am not a paleontologist, or even a scientifically-minded person,
but, even before looking at the web to see ways that scientists have
responded to young-earth creationism, I had questions in my mind as I
read Clarey’s book. Clarey’s book is not just a defense of young-earth
creationism, but it also aims to describe the characteristics of various
dinosaurs. One can almost get the impression in reading the book that
certain dinosaurs were designed to be meat eaters: their body was
structured in such a way that would enable them to catch their prey or
to eat meat safely, or the T.Rex’s appetite could only be satisfied by
eating quantities of animals. The information that Clarey presents, in
these cases, appears to conflict with his view that the carnivorous
dinosaurs were created by God to be vegetarians. In addition, I would
submit that evolution may account for some of the details that Clarey
mentions better than design does. Clarey argues, for example, that an
animal having sharp teeth does not preclude it from being a vegetarian,
for we know of vegetarian animals that have sharp teeth. Why, though,
would God design an animal with sharp teeth that it does not need? On
the other hand, evolutionists point to animals who have organs or
body-parts that they do not seem to use, and they believe that is
consistent with evolution.

In looking at the web—-and ignoring the creationist web sites—-I do
get the impression that Clarey highlights at least one controversy
within the mainstream scientific community, and that concerns the
question of whether birds evolved from dinosaurs. There does appear to
be some debate about that within the mainstream scientific community, as
some say that certain dinosaurs may have evolved from earlier forms of
birds.

I give this book four stars because Clarey does attempt to support
his position and to interact with other points of view. His love for
his subject matter was also evident and endearing. The book may also be
a helpful resource on the history of research into dinosaurs and
dinosaur characteristics. Moreover, this book can stimulate thought and
research, particularly if it encourages readers to find out about what
other scientists think about young earth creationism, the phenomena that
Clarey discusses, and the rationales for their positions.

I received a complimentary review copy of this book through Cross Focused Reviews, in exchange for an honest review.

3 comments:

Thanks for having read my blog, at least the blog on flood geology. Cool. Flood geology was rejected by Christian men of science in the 1800s. It was revived by several non geologists in the 1960s with the popularity of an Evangelical Christian book filled with misinformation, The Genesis Flood.

There are geological horizons containing dinosaur nests with eggs, some already hatched. Such egg-nesting horizons sometimes lay beneath one another, suggesting it took time for dinosaurs to find mates, build nests in the same area again and again, bear fertilized eggs, incubate them, and the young hatched. And then a volcano buried the nesting area. And this happened not just once but more than once. This all takes time, not a year long flood.

Concerning vegetarianism there are minerals that accumulate to a greater degree in the bones of carnivores than vegetarians, because the carnivores eat the vegetarians, and we find those minerals in greater degree as expected, in the bones of dinosaurs that have the morphology of appearing to be carnivores. We also find fossilized dinosaur poop containing the boney remains of the animals they ate

On your first point, I will reading a few posts along those lines on the Natural Historian blog this morning: about the time that this all took. I think that the creationist who wrote that dinosaur book was saying that the flood occurred in stages, and that was how he was trying to account for the layers. But I doubt that accounts for the evidence.

On the vegetarianism, my impression is that the creationist who wrote that book believes that carnivorous dinosaurs did eat meat after the Fall. What puzzled me was that he seemed to be presenting their bodies as especially suited for that, which would arguably contradict his idea that they were designed to be vegetarians.

There's also dinosaur footprints found deep in the earth in coal mines with plenty of sediment beneath them, and above them. Sometimes you find a fossilized tree with its roots in situ in such mines as well as fossilized dinosaur prints at the base of the fossilized tree, meaning the tree had grown in place with the dinosaur walking around its base. And it takes a tree a long time to grow, and the dinosaur walking around its base also demonstrates, along with the tree and its roots, that that is where the level of the land used to be. So all the sediments below and above were not formed in a year by one long flood. And such evidence cannot be compared to the tree trunks uprooted by Mt. St. Helens that sunk to the bottom of Spirit lake, since they have no roots nor animals tracks around their base. "Flood geologists" also have to face multiple layers in which fossilized dinosaur nests are found, since it takes time to find a mate and build a nest, and lay the eggs on dry ground and the eggs to hatch (some of them are hatched already, meaning you have to count in gestation time as well, and multiple times at which this occurred since such formations are not all found at the same level), so that's the level at which dry ground existed, where the dinosaurs were breeding and nesting. This is not evidence of a huge year long Flood. References: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/coalprints.html http://www.allanmccollum.net/allanmcnyc/reprints/Pdfs/peterson.pdf http://talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/trees.html